


One Hundred Years, One Hundred More

by DinosaurTheology



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Angst, Battle, F/M, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 05:18:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15284523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: Zelda has fought against the Calamity for one hundred years, she'll fight it for one hundred more. She'll stand against it for as long as it takes, but damn it all, why does it have to take so long?





	One Hundred Years, One Hundred More

**Author's Note:**

> I love this game! I'm a Zelda junkie, anyway, and it was my first fandom--produced some seriously horrid and, thankfully, unpublished anywhere stories for A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time when I was just a little wee thing. Hopefully I'm a little less horrid, now, and that everyone enjoys.

How long can you do the same thing, Zelda wonders, before you go absolutely and completely insane? How long can a woman look at the same walls, walk the same floors and complete the patterns of the same day before she goes completely out of her mind? Is it a week, a month? A hundred years?

She doesn’t know. It’s been that long, at least, and could be as long again until he returns to her and they bring about the end to this Calamity. So until then she holds the line, takes the weight of Mount Lanayru upon her slim shoulders It’s one thing to follow the same banal schedule until one is out of her mind but… this is worse, so much worse. It’s a struggle each minute of each day, a war fought against the cruelest enemy she can fathom and it does not cease even in the few moments of sleep she snatches from its slavering jaws each day when the sun is high and its power is at lowest ebb. 

She remembers her mother during these times in the months leading up to her death. The queen had wasted away to a husk, seemed to be burned out from the inside by a disease that ate her flesh and stripped it away to the bone. She would lay in the sickbed at their family’s retreat on the side of Satori Mountain overlooking Rutile Lake and rave, eyes bright in the gloom of an opulent chamber made into a charnel house by her illness, unable to utter even coherent sentences.

Zelda remembers, and a blush of shame heats her cheeks when she does, that she had not even visited her mother in the last fortnight of her all too short, tragic life. She had wished to allow the queen her pride, she told herself, tells herself still, but knows at the center of her being that it is not true. She simply could not bear to see her mother this way. It cut her to the quick to see a face so like her own--the same blue, kind eyes and bow lips, only these bushy damned eyebrows were her father’s--hollowed and chiseled by the inexorable march of a lung flux that even Purrah’s potions could not hope to assuage.

She had visited before then, once or twice, before the end. The queen had coughed up blood and hunks of tissue that clung stickily to the pale, almost translucent skin of her lips and chin. It was too much for a girl of twelve to bear and so she had fled. It’s another moment she remembers as she twists in a fire of shame.

Zelda asked her father, later, if her mother was in pain. He said no, child, and hugged her close. Impa, having the same question put to her, demurred and said that Purrah’s medicines were the best available. She told her that the ancient Sheikah techniques preserved in Kakariko Village would save Zelda’s mother if anything could. She avoided the question with the deft expertise of the Sheikah stalker she was.

It is only Urbosa, closer to her mother than a sister and the aunt of Zelda’s heart, who answered with the cold cruelty of truth. She softened the blow by lounging upon a cushion in Gerudo Town and patting her lap. “Come to me, Little Bird,” she had said. “Lies are an evil, even soft lies, and I swear before the Dancer Din and Nabooru’s spirit that I will do no evil unto you.”

Zelda drew close to her and, sitting in the lap of a woman whose tawny skin smells of sunshine and to whose hair the fragrance of cloves, cinnamon and warm saffina cling, unburdened her heart. Urbosa grimaced at the weight of her question and the oaths she had sworn. Would it be worth being forsworn to keep her Little Bird from pain?

No. An oath to the goddess and the sage of the desert was not to be broken lightly and little birds must leave the nest eventually… but oh, oh, did it have to be now? She steeled herself and said, “Your mother is in great pain, Little Bird. A cruel disease eats away at her and she will have no peace until she dies and her body climbs to Skyloft to be with her mother and her mother before her. Be strong for her and your father if you can, Little Bird, and I will be strong for you.”

“I will,” Zelda had said, and then Urbosa gathered her into her arms. The tears came in a flood and she understood, in her mind at least, what Urbosa meant when she described her mother’s great pain.

She understands it in her heart, now, in the aching muscles and unknit sinews of her body. She cannot go on, although she knows she must, and it isn’t fair, dammit. But whoever said that anything in this life was fair? She had learned that young watching her mother waste away, hadn’t she? And Link…

Link. 

The quiet, serious young man whose only crime had been to lay down his life in defense of her. She wants to remember how his firm, gentle hands would cup her face, how his lips would brush against hers, her lashes, the tip of her nose. Most of all she wants to remember his eyes, wide, blue and uptilting slightly at the corners.

She cannot. What she remembers, instead, is blood--the syrupy feel of it on her fingers and the stench in her nostrils like flakes of rust stripped off in a gale. Arrows pierce him through the arms, thigh and throat. Bruises mar the high, handsome cheekbones. But worst of all, worst of all, is the great rent in his torso. It discloses ragged muscle, pale ribs and pulsing organs and seems to have been made by the tusks of a rampaging boar or the claws of a honeyvore. A beast, in other words. Her champion, her lover, her best friend was ripped apart by a great beast and there could be no stopping it.

So Zelda stands eye to eye with it instead. She has for one hundred years and will for one hundred more on and until the end of time, forever and--oh, pray to Nayru the Singer and the goddess Hylia--amen. 

But she’s tired, dammit, so tired. She is ready to relax her aching body, let the darkness take her, lie down and join her hero in repose. They can face this calamity in another life. Haven’t they before, after all? It cannot hurt to do so again. It’s what the legend says, may even be what the Triforce demands. The story will go on as long as there is a boy, a girl and a demon.

It’s not good enough. She knows with her own good damned sense as well as with the shard of wisdom buried in her heart. The unchecked power of this calamity would consume the world and another time might not exist for the germs of their souls to fight it in. The beast has grown bloated, strong, a serpent that wraps around all of Hyrule. She must fight it here, must make her stand. But why, oh why, must she stand alone?

She cannot and she knows it. And so Zelda waits for the thrill in her bones, the inkling deep inside to tell her that Link has awakened from his sleep and is coming to her aid like he did so many times before. She will hold the calamity at bay until he comes, no matter how tired she is, how much it hurts. She has held it for one hundred years, she’ll hold it for one hundred more.


End file.
